Exactly who
is Alain Badiou?His name is being
mentioned with increasing frequency amongst English-speaking theorists.Slavoj iek publicly proclaims that he is
the next major philosophical figure emerging from France after Derrida.But, despite this, only three of his many
booksBadiou has been steadily publishing since the late 1960shave been
translated:Deleuze, Ethics,
and Manifesto for Philosophy.Most problematically, his sizeable magnum opus, LÊtre et
lévénement (Being and the Event), remains untranslated.And, up until now, no comprehensive
introduction to his work has been available in English.Jason Barkers overview of Alain Badious
thought is thus a timely text placed in a position where it will almost
certainly influence discussions of Badiou in the near future due to its being
the first lengthy piece of secondary literature on this interesting thinker.

Barker
begins the book by summarizing Badious intellectual itinerary and, in the
first chapter, sketching a picture of his philosophical beginnings as a Maoist
student of the French Marxist Louis Althusser.Given his background, one might expect that Badiou would resemble other
well-known thinkers who are part of the generation that matured in the
continental European context surrounding the May 68 events, namely, those
authors closely associated with post-structuralism and post-modernism.Instead, what one encounters when reading
Badiou is someone virulently opposed to nearly all of the central tenets he
associates with the new sophists (i.e., those promoting a sort of pervasive
relativism inspired by such influences as Nietzsche, Heidegger, the later Wittgenstein,
and the hermeneutic/linguistic turn dominating twentieth-century philosophy on
both sides of the Atlantic).Pushing
off against this pervasive sophistical relativism, Badiou provocatively dubs
himself a Platonist.What could he
mean?Why would anyone embrace a
paradigm that has fallen into such widespread disrepute?

For Badiou,
being a Platonist signifies, first and foremost, affirming an idea of truth as
invariant and universal.Contemporary
philosophy is underwritten by a series of possible permutations for denying
this affirmation:truth doesnt exist;
truth is the illusory effect of social, historical, and economic constructions;
truth is relative to the symbolic-linguistic systems framing it; truth is a
fictional tool manipulated by power mechanisms and so on and so forth.Of course, critical readings of Plato often
point out that the standards for truth articulated by Socrates in the
dialogues are borrowed directly from the then-novel discovery of mathematical
and geometrical laws.The insinuation
is, obviously, that a particular knowledge-domain from the ancient Greek world
is arbitrarily elevated into a general, overarching standard for all
thought.Rather than defend Platonism
in the style of an apologist by downplaying the references to Pythagorean
themes, Badiou happily affirms the central role of mathematics in both
epistemology and, even more controversially, the formulation of a genuine
ontology.However, the mathematics that
Badiou employs in his endeavor to revive Platonism, as well as the supposed
Platonism resulting from this exercise, wouldnt be known or recognized by
Plato (in the field of mathematics, Badious principle point of reference is
set theory, especially as developed by Georg Cantor).Barker succeeds in conveying the basic gist of Badious system
without getting mired in lengthy explanations of the mathematical ideas
employed by Badiou, ideas with which most of his reading audience probably
isnt acquainted.However, for those
interested, Barker includes a short appendix at the end of the book listing the
axioms of set theory that are crucial for grasping the notions at stake here.

According to Badiou, everything
that can be said to exist is also, necessarily, numerable (i.e., subsumable
under the laws of mathematics).At
first, this might sound like nothing more than an explicit version of the
implicit ontology spontaneously secreted by the natural sciences, grounded, as
these sciences are, by physics:since
all material entities, ranging from the smallest microscopic organisms to the
largest clusters of galaxies, are composed of atoms and sub-atomic
particlesand since these microscopic constituents of all entities are
ostensibly described in an exhaustive manner by the formal representational frameworks
of mathematics as employed by physicsit follows that mathematics is the
universal language of being itself.Although Badious insistence on mathematizing ontology resonates with
modern, post-Galilean science, it isnt simply a reiteration of this
worldview.For Badiou, the recourse to
set theory in particular enables an enumeration not only of material nature,
which is as far as the spontaneous philosophy of the scientists (to quote
Althusser) goes, but also of social formations, political institutions,
economic configurations, and similar domains of human being.The groupings and orderings that take shape
in these areas admit of mathematization too.These moves on Badious part do indeed represent an attempt to revive a
form of Platonism, especially if one remembers that, throughout the Socratic
dialogues, truths just as eternal as the relations between numbers are sought
after in every domain of inquiry:statesmanship, art, love, ethics, and many other matters.

LÊtre et lévénement was published
in 1988.Ten years later, a shorted,
revised summary of this central text, entitled Court traité dontologie
transitoire (Short Treatise on Transitory Ontology), appeared.Its closing chapter, Lêtre et
lapparaître, provides a concise, condensed argument encapsulating some of
the most profound results of Badious use of set theory in the articulation of
an ontology.With reference to Kants
Critique of Pure Reason, one could claim that Badiou launches a sort of
Copernican counter-revolution through his contention, arrived at via the
premises outlined immediately below, that the categorically/conceptually
expressible relations between phenomena qua appearances arise immanently
from being itself, as opposed to issuing from the de-ontologized understanding
sitting at the center of Kantian idealisms subjectivity.Whereas Kant bars the subject from having a
direct and unmediated relation to being by depriving all appearances accessible
to the knowing individual of any ontological weight, for Badiou, the very
nature of being is to appear.How does
he reach this conclusion?His
demonstration consists of five steps.First, there is no set of all sets, no being of all beings; being per
se, in and of itself, is non-existent.Badiou maintains that set theory, under the assumption that mathematics
is, to a greater or lesser extent, a direct expression of the Real, forces one
to side with the antitheses of Kants first two antinomies of pure reason.This first premise expresses Badious most
foundational ontological principle, namely, that being qua being is
pure multiplicity.Second, following
from the first premise, every ontological investigation is local(ized), that is
to say, restricted to dealing with particular incarnated beings rather than a
given whole.Third, all being is a
being-there, and Badiou designates the local sites of beings disclosure as
situations.Fourth, situations frame
specific appearances (of beings), with the essence of appearance defined as the
being-there of being.Fifth and
finally, it therefore follows that appearing is an intrinsic determination of
being.Whats more, appearance, which
necessarily entails differential determination (i.e., each appearance takes on
its meaning, value, significance, and so in connection and/or contrast with
other appearances), always-already implicitly refers to the impossible,
non-existent totality of being as the greatest set of all possible relations
between beings-as-appearances (with this reference thus accounting for the
transcendental illusion of wholeness, the specter of ontological completeness
haunting human reason as a regulative idea).This similarly means that logic and its grounding categories, as
expressions of relations obtaining between appearances, arise from, instead of
somehow preceding, the manifestation of appearances.In the course of this argument, Badiou also
notes that the key starting premise here is an internal result of
(formal-mathematical) reason itself, rather than having anything to do with either
a hasty reference to the inaccessibility of a directly given noumenal realm or
the dogmatic assertion of a presumed limit transcending the powers of reason.

Is Badious theoretical universe a
fully mathematized one?Answering in
the affirmative would be to forget the second term in the title LÊtre et
lévénementwhat does Badiou mean by event?Perhaps this can be explained through a brief recourse to
Hegel.The starting point of Hegels
logic is the dialecticized distinction between being and nothing.In the attempt to think pure, brute being an
sich, above and beyond all individual given beings, one arrives at the
thought of nothingness (i.e., of no given being in particular).The reconciliation of this artificial or
false dichotomyit shows itself to be artificial/false as an opposition due to
one term (being) passing into or converging with the other (nothing)yields the
category of becoming, thereby setting in motion the unfolding movement of the
dialectic.At various moments in his
exposition, Barker notes that Badiou is often influenced by Hegelian modes of
thought.However, when it comes to the
two fundamental nodes of his own system, Badiou is decidedly non-Hegelian.He proposes that an unbridgeable gulf, a
sharp break or rupture, separates being and event, with no potential for
eventual synthesis in and through a third term.Being designates everything which can be said to exist as part of
an infinite multiplicity of (e)numerable sets, groups, and classes.Events, on the other hand, lack being, and
therefore cannot be counted as integrated parts of the extant field of
being(s).Barkers third chapter, The
Event of Non-Being, phrases this in several ways, including, among othersThe
event is the forbidden multiple, prohibited from being.It is beings gap or interval The event cannot be, its non-being is
unthinkable (pg. 67);the event is
that which is not being as being an event is irreducible to any kind of logic or intuition The event of philosophy always registers an
impact, disturbing an equilibrium of whatever kind, or in other words and
invoking Badious generic categories, ruptures the prevailing
scientific, political, amorous or artistic norms of a situation (pg. 75).Is there any way to make these seemingly
abstract proclamations a little more concrete?For instance, how could one explain the fashion in which Badious
conception of event cuts against the grain of a certain prevalent contemporary
Hegelianism?

Barkers introduction to Badiou, in
order to effectively function as an introduction, restricts itself to focusing
on some texts rather than others.This
is necessary when outlining the entire oeuvre of a prolific author.Nonetheless, one of Badious pieces of
writing neglected in Barkers summary, Saint Paul:La fondation de luniversalisme (1997), is especially helpful
in clarifying the nature of the non-dialectical opposition between being and
event.Badiou observes that Saint Paul
treats Christs crucifixion and resurrection as a pure event in his precise
sense, in other words, as an occurrence that in no way can be reduced to the
socio-ontological background coordinates (i.e., the historical/cultural
event-site) out of and against which it emerges (in this case, a world divided
up between Roman and Jewish life-worlds).A dialectical view always attempts to show how even what appears to be
the most radical and complete rupture with a given historical continuum is
itself, ultimately, an immanently produced result of this same historical
continuum.In the end, dialectics
invariably seeks to locate a thread of consistency between seemingly
heterogeneous elements, and this deep-seated bias reveals itself in nearly
every variation of historicism practiced in twentieth-century philosophy.Against this historical/philosophical
stance, Badiou invokes the example of Saint Pauls insistence that the truth
of Christ (i.e., the event of his crucifixion and resurrection), while
occurring in a context involving Roman society, Jewish tradition, and the influence
of Greek thought, utterly and completely surpasses this multifaceted contextual
event-site to such an extent that it can in no way be reconciled or
reintegrated with this background.Badiou speaks of Saint Pauls anti-dialectics.After the event of this truths advent, the
old guiding references (Roman, Jew, Greek, etc.) lose their relevance, proving
themselves unable to measure the impact of a truth that shatters their meaning
and stability; for Badiou, timeless truths surface through the contingent
vicissitudes of temporally unfolding history, and the universal is born out of
the particular without, for all that, being any less universal.Treating Christ, for instance, as an
innovative representative of Judaism would be, in Saint Pauls view, to miss
and betray the genuine import of the figure of Christ.Against Hegelianisms tendency to conclude,
with a self-satisfied sigh of smug resignation, that theres nothing new under
the sun, Badious overall project could be engaged with, in large part, as a
sustained effort to contemplate the new, to ponder how it is indeed possible
for the extant reality of existence to be taken by surprise again and
again:How can what is seen as
impossible in a present situation sometimes actually happen?An approach unswervingly oriented towards
continuity is incapable of doing justice to the truths unveiling themselves
through events that break the mold of accumulated givens.Similarly, despite moments where he might
sound vaguely akin to someone like Heidegger, Badiou is no existentialist:events are definitely not, for him, features
of being-in-the-world, if by world one means (to paraphrase the young
Wittgenstein of the Tractatus) all that is the case or the
experiential, environmental horizons of Daseins being.

In his fourth chapter, The
Politics of Truth, Barker is careful to nuance his interpretation of the above
notions.Badiou stipulates that the
status of an event as an event per se is volatile and uncertain.Whether or not a given occurrence
shouldwith this should, one sees the tip of the ethico-political iceberg
rear up in Badious thoughtqualify as an event qua emergence of a truth
cannot be firmly decided during the moments surrounding it.As is the case for Lacan (a major influence
on Badiou), truth is held captive by a futur antérieur.Risking a formulation in laymans terms,
truth only becomes truth as such through the retroactive verdict of history,
that is to say, by proving, through its endurance, to be immune to any subsequent
upheavals and fluctuations in the state of knowledge; it becomes indispensable
to thought.Thus, bringing the truth of
an event to fruition requires what Badiou calls the fidelity of a subject,
since the events truth has to endure long enough in a quasi-indeterminate
status to, so to speak, reap the benefits of a favorable historical
verdict.The beginning of the
truth-process at work between the event and its subject resides in deciding,
without further ground or guarantee, that an event has, in actuality,
occurred.In other words, one has to
decide whether an occurrence represents a previously inconceivable break with
the paradigms endemic to the status quo:Does a certain discovery really represent the foundation of a new
science?Is a particular social
disturbance the manifestation of a genuine revolutionary upheaval and should it
be treated as such?Will a given
cultural product such as a novel, painting, or film usher in an unprecedented
aesthetic genre?The event is then
named, assigned markers capable of singling it out and attesting to its having
taken place.This process of decision
and nomination involves the creation of a subject, more specifically, a type of
subjectivity whose identity is conditioned by the event and its truth (using an
example from above, for Saint Paul, the event of Christ is that which gives
rise to the Christian subject, and this event and its truth are sustained
through this same subject naming and remaining faithful to them).The subject is thereby the support of
truth.Although the margin of doubt
subsisting during the sometimes lengthy period of truths becoming cannot be
eliminatedthis explains why Badiou chooses a word like fidelity to describe
the stance of a subject-of-the-event towards the events truththis doesnt
mean, as the skeptic is always too eager to conclude, that there is no
truth.It simply means that the
emergence of timeless truth takes time.

Barkers fifth chapter, The Cult
of Deleuze, sketches the relation between Badiou and Gilles Deleuze.Deleuze is, arguably, the French
contemporary closest to Badiou on numerous philosophical points.In Deleuze:The Clamor of Being, Badiou launches his critique of
Deleuze.Typically, due to impressions
stemming from his later capitalism and schizophrenia
work with Félix Guattari, Deleuze is portrayed as someone who celebrates (to
put it in the same jargon used by Deleuzians) the plurality of the thriving,
rhizomatic machines of anti-Oedipal desire.Cutting through this verbiage, one could say that Deleuze is a thinker
of lawless, heterogeneous multiplicity.Badiou convincingly destroys this image:beneath his rhetoric, Deleuze is, like Spinoza (one of Deleuzes
favorite philosophers), a die-hard ontological monist.The absolute oneness of being, the fact that
all temptations to formulate multi-tiered ontologies must be resisted, is
monotonously stressed in text after textBadious emphasis on the virtual
status of unities and correlative insistence on the multiple character of being,
while sounding Deleuzian, is evidently, on Badious own reading of Deleuze,
incompatible with this ontological monism.Barker claims that, the dispute between Badiou and Deleuze is that
which exists, in principle, between an ordered conception of chaos, one which
is mathematically definable, and a chaotic conception of order, one which is
philosophically intuitive (pg. 118).The Deleuzian project involves the effort to push both logic and sense
so far that they start to break down and, in so doing, reveal that the logic
of sense is, oddly enough, ultimately grounded on a foundation of nonsense
(the notion of sense arising from nonsense, or meaning being based on
meaninglessness, also plays an important part in the trajectory of structural
linguistics after Saussure, especially as developed by Roman Jakobson).Rather than base an ontology on a
homogenous-yet-chaotic flux of intensities, Badiou chooses to affirm that
multiple being is itself capable of an orderly, systematic delineation vis-à-vis
the formal apparatuses of mathematics.To put it in Lacanian terms, mathemes of being can be traced.

The sixth and final chapter of
Barkers book turns to Badious ethics of philosophy.On this topic, Badiou is at his very
polemical best when confronting the new sophists of post-modernism.In the continental philosophical tradition
ever since Levinas, an ethics of the difference of the Other has predominated
to the point of effectively crowding out any serious alternative.Proponents of this stance adamantly insist
that the root of all evils is a lack of sufficient and proper respect for the
differences of others.This bit of
academic dogma reflects a broader popular ideology of (multi)culturalism:once people become comfortable with each
others lifestyles and tastes, things will be just fine.In his Ethics:An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, Badiou launches a
scathing attack on the ethics of difference.A passage from this text offers the finest summary of his position:

The objective (or historical)
foundation of contemporary ethics is culturalism, in truth a tourists fascination
for the diversity of morals, customs and beliefs. And in particular, for the
irreducible medley of imaginary formations (religions, sexual representations, incarnations
of authority ). Yes, the essential
objective bias of ethics rests on a vulgar
sociology, directly inherited from the astonishment of the colonial encounter with
savages (pg. 26).

Against these trifling descriptions
(of a reality that is both obvious and inconsistent in itself), genuine thought should
affirm the following principle:since
differences are what there is, and since every
truth is the coming-to-be of that which is not yet, so differences are then precisely
what truths depose, or render insignificant.No light is shed on any concrete
situation by the notion of the recognition of the other.Every modern collective configuration involves people from
everywhere, who have their different ways of
eating and speaking, who wear different sorts of headgear, follow different
religions, have complex and varied relations to sexuality, prefer authority or disorder, and
such is the way of the world (pg. 27).

Difference as such isnt worthy of the labor of thinking,
being what is most obvious and immediately given in todays globalized living
spaces.Instead, the challenge to
think the same, to grasp what is true for all and thus what should be
dignified as universal, is increasingly more relevant and pressing in
contemporary socio-political contexts.Given the plurality of cultures and lifestyles, what ethical truths, as
truths in Badious strong sense, can still be endorsed?What happens when the ethics of the
recognition of alterity fails, when the Other refuses to reciprocate this
cheap-and-easy gesture of recognition?For instance, what about the ethico-political crises of Western
societies faced with others who, on principle, refuse to accept the underlying,
fundamental democratic social contract of these societies attempting to
integrate them?How should one respond
in these real-world situations that give the lie to the hollow rhetoric of
limitless tolerance?Slicing through a
whole series of Gordian knots and specious falsehoods, Badiou realizes that, in
the reign of a doctrine of otherness where each and every individual is defined
chiefly in terms of differences, difference is a difference that makes no difference.As Barker puts it, If everyone is different
then it must follow that such difference simply adds up to the same thing (pg.
137).The twentieth-centurys relativism
isnt just theoretically questionable; it might also be morally suspect, tacitly
promoting an intellectual laziness (usually dressed up as chic
pessimism) that refuses to continue philosophys traditional task of seeking,
beneath the scintillating-yet-superficial façade of little differences, the
true, the same, and the universal. As
iek has passionately advocated in his recent writings, thought mustnt allow
itself to be blackmailed into backing down from its quest for the indifferently
invariant by ivory tower squeals that every such quest ends in
totalitarianism.

Jason Barkers
book is well worth recommending to anyone who is beginning the process of
grappling with the corpus of Alain Badiou.Barker lucidly outlines the contours of Badious system and furnishes
readers with concise definitions of its key technical terms.Furthermore, a hoped-for consequence of
Barkers introduction is that it will hasten the arrival of more English
translations of texts by Badiou.Given
the originality, complexity, and sheer rigor of his thought, Badiou ought to be
generating more intellectual excitement in the years to come.

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